The Marathas, Part 3 - The Making of a King

Shivneri

The house of Bhonsle, a mother's resolve, and a childhood built for one purpose

He was born on 19 February 1630 in the hill-fort of Shivneri, above Junnar, and named for the goddess Śivāī whose shrine stands within its walls. His father was Shahaji Bhonsle — a soldier of the first rank who served Ahmadnagar, then Bijapur, then briefly held Pune and Supe as his own, and who at one point in the 1630s came close to raising an independent Nizamshahi under his own protection. Shahaji's world was the mercenary world of the Deccan sultanates, where a Marathi commander of ability could rise very high in another man's service and could be broken by that same master at any moment. He was a great man in a system designed to prevent great Marathi men from becoming sovereign.

His mother was Jijābāī, daughter of Lakhuji Jadhav of Sindkhed — and it is not possible to write this history honestly without placing her at its centre. Shahaji's duties took him to Bangalore; Jijābāī raised the boy at Pune on the family jāgīr, in a countryside recently burned over by Bijapuri and Mughal armies. She had watched her own father and brothers cut down at the Nizamshahi court. She raised her son on the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata, on the stories of Rāma and of Kṛṣṇa, on the memory of what the Deccan had been under its own kings — and she did not raise him to be a successful vassal. The Śivabhārata of the court poet Kavīndra Paramānanda, composed at Shivaji's own instance, presents him from the first as one born for a purpose. Whatever one makes of the poetics, the pedagogy is beyond dispute: this was a child brought up to end an occupation. Settled

The detail of her life explains the steel in it. Her father Lakhujī Jādhav of Sindkhed was of the Yādava line — the very house that had ruled at Devagiri — and served the Nizamshahi. In 1629 Lakhujī and three of his sons were called to the court at Daulatabad and murdered there, cut down in the durbar hall on the Sultan's order. Jijābāī, already married into the Bhonsle family and by then estranged from her father over that marriage, lost father and brothers in a single morning at the hands of the power her husband served. She was pregnant with Shivaji within the year, and she bore him in a fort. Six of her children died. She had watched, in one lifetime, the murder of her natal house by its master, the repeated humiliation of her husband by his, and the burning of the Pune country by armies of both.

What she was sent to was not a town but a curse.

The Donkey and the Golden Plough

The razing of Pune, and the rite that answered it

Pune — Punawadi, Kasbe Pune — was old. It is mentioned from the seventh century; it had temples of Puneshwar and Narayaneshwar, which the Delhi sultanate had earlier torn down and converted to dargahs. Under the Nizamshahi the settlement was walled, with a small citadel called the Pandharicha Kot inside the wall and three outlying peths beyond it. It was the seat of the Bhonsle jāgīr, granted to Malōjī Bhonsle in 1599 and passed to Shāhajī.

In 1630 — the year Shivaji was born — an Adilshahi army under Murār Jagdeo fell on it. The Bhonsles were then in Nizamshahi service and the town was destroyed for that reason. The walls were thrown down and the citadel levelled. The houses were burned. The population was scattered or killed.

And then Jagdeo did the thing the country never forgot. He had an iron rod driven into the ground and a plough drawn across the ruined town by donkeys. Settled

The meaning of that act must be understood or the rest makes no sense. Ploughing a destroyed settlement with asses was an ancient and deliberate formula of malediction: it declares that the place shall not be a town again, that it has been returned to waste ground and is under interdict — the donkey, the inauspicious beast, drawing the furrow that unmakes a habitation. The iron rod was driven in to fix the curse in the soil. This was not simply destruction. It was a ritual statement that Pune was finished for ever, and it was aimed precisely at the family whose seat it was.

Six years later that family's women and children were sent to live in it.

The answer

When Jijābāī arrived with the boy and Dādojī Koṇḍadev around 1636, she did not simply clear the rubble and start building. She answered the curse in its own language, form for form.

The iron rod was pulled out of the ground. And a plough was drawn across the same earth again — this time a golden ploughshare drawn by bullocks, the auspicious beast, in the rite by which ground is consecrated for habitation and cultivation. Settled Where the donkey's furrow had declared the place waste, the golden furrow declared it a town again and under protection. Settlers were called back from the surrounding country and from further afield; cultivators were given seed and remissions; the wells were cleaned; the peths were laid out afresh, with Kasba Peth — the old walled core — as the heart of the revived settlement, and the later peths named for the days of the week as the city grew outward. The Lal Mahal was raised for the household and completed about 1640.

Consider what a boy of six or seven learned by watching this. That an enemy had cursed his family's town with donkeys and an iron spike; that his mother had walked into the ruins and reversed the rite with gold and bullocks; and that the town then filled up again with people who had been afraid to live in it. He learned, before he could have put it into words, that desecration can be answered — that what has been unmade by ritual and force can be remade by ritual and work. Every temple he later rebuilt, every image restored, every forcibly converted man he brought home by śuddhi, is the same act repeated at larger scale.

Kasba Ganpati: the deity of the reborn city

The restoration needed a presiding deity, and one was found.

Among the families called back to settle the ruined town was that of Vināyak Bhaṭṭa Ṭhākar, who came with seven other families from Indi in the Bijapur country of Karnataka, carrying his kuladevatā Gajanana with him. They settled by the river close to Jijābāī's residence. There, in the ground of the ruined town, a svayambhū image of Gaṇapati was found — self-manifested, naturally formed, and by the tradition originally no larger than a grain of rice. Ṭhākar received a dṛṣṭānta, a directing dream, in which the deity asked to be duly installed; Dādojī Koṇḍadev carried the report to Jijābāī. Smrti

She took it for precisely what the moment required — an auspicious sign that the ground had been accepted — and commissioned a temple on the spot. The sanctum was built, the image installed and consecrated, and by the tradition of the shrine the consecration was performed at the hands of the boy Shivaji himself. Records suggest a shrine had stood there from about 1619; what Jijābāī built in 1636 is the sanctum that stands today, in the Puṇerī wāḍā style, in stone, given its carved woodwork later by the Peshwas. The image is now far larger than a grain of rice, grown by four centuries of accreted red sandalwood paste.

The temple was made the grāmadevatā — the presiding deity of the city — and has remained so without interruption. A convention formed at once and was kept for the rest of his life: before marching on any campaign, Shivaji came first to Kasba Ganpati with his commanders and took the blessing. Smrti The Svarājya went out from this doorstep. Pratapgad, Sinhagad, Surat, the Konkan, the Karnataka — the men who did those things stood in this courtyard first.

Its afterlife is of a piece with its founding. When Tilak made Gaṇeśotsav a public festival in 1893 to build a national movement under the cover of devotion, it was Kasba Ganpati he made Manacā Pahilā Gaṇpatī — first in honour among the five great Gaṇpatīs of Pune, receiving the first invitation to every civic occasion and leading the immersion procession. The deity installed to consecrate a town raised from a curse became, two and a half centuries later, the head of a procession that was training a nation to assemble. It leads the immersion still.

Jijābāī, having rebuilt the town, then governed it. She resettled cultivators, restored temples, sat in judgment, heard petitions and ran the estate in her son's name. He grew up watching his mother govern — and when he came to make his own arrangements he made the welfare of the cultivator the first charge upon the state. She lived to see him crowned at Raigad and died twelve days later, her work finished. Settled

His practical education came from Dādojī Koṇḍadev, the administrator of the Pune jāgīr, who taught him horsemanship, the sword, the spear, and the far less romantic arts of revenue, land measurement and the management of men. And it came from the Māval — the hill country west of Pune, the ravines and ridges of the Sahyādri, where he rode as a boy among the Māvaḷā peasantry: Yesāji Kank, Tānājī Malusare, Bājī Pāsalkar, Kānhojī Jedhe, Bājī Prabhu Deshpande. These were not courtiers. They were cultivators, herdsmen and hillmen who knew every pass and every water-source in that country, and who became the finest light infantry in India. He grew up as one of them, and they followed him for the rest of their lives, and many of them died for him.

It is worth being precise about what the Māval gave him, because the whole military system followed from it. The Sahyādri here is not gentle country: laterite and basalt ridges rising a thousand metres, cut by ravines, forested on the western scarp, with passes that narrow to a few metres and monsoon rain of two and a half thousand millimetres that closes the ghats for four months. A heavy army cannot deploy in it, cannot feed itself in it, cannot bring artillery through it, and cannot see more than a few hundred metres in any direction. Cavalry — the arm on which every Deccan and Mughal force depended — is nearly useless there.

The Māvaḷās moved through it at speed on foot, carrying almost nothing, living on bhākrī and dried onion, and they knew where the water was. What Shivaji built out of them was the method later called gaṇimī kāvā: strike the enemy's supply and communications rather than his line of battle; never accept engagement on ground of his choosing; use night, rain and terrain as weapons; disperse when pressed and reassemble at a named place; and hold the forts, which cannot be starved because the cisterns are cut into the rock. It was not a peasant's improvisation. It was a doctrine, taught, and applied with discipline for forty years.

Raireshwar: the oath

In 1645, at the age of fifteen or sixteen, he took his companions to the Śiva temple at Raireshwar and there — by the tradition Maharashtra has held ever since — they swore the oath of Hindavī Svarājya, cutting their thumbs and letting the blood fall on the liṅga. Smrti In the same period he wrote to Dādojī the letter in which the phrase appears in his own hand: that Hindavī Svarājya was the will of the divine — hē rājya vhāvē hī śrīñcī icchā. Whatever the ceremonial details, the political fact is dated and hard: a teenager in a Bijapuri jāgīr had determined to found a sovereign Hindu state, and began that year to take forts.

The Man Himself

Physique, bearing, habits — from those who saw him

Because his fame spread so quickly and so far, it is worth setting down what those who actually stood in front of him recorded.

He was not a large man. The consistent testimony — Mughal, Portuguese, English and Marathi alike — is of a figure of middling or less than middling height, spare and very lightly built, with nothing of the heavy-boned warrior about him. What every observer notes instead is speed: a quickness of movement that struck people as unnatural, an ability to mount, ride, climb and fight for hours that exhausted far bigger men. He was an exceptional horseman from boyhood and a practised climber of exactly the sort of rock his forts stood on.

The Mughal court's own description of him at Agra in 1666, preserved in Jadunath Sarkar's House of Shivaji, records an appearance strikingly fair, a slight frame, and — the detail every witness fastens on — eyes of extraordinary sharpness and mobility, restless, missing nothing, so quick that the observer thought them the most remarkable thing about him. Settled Others speak of a high forehead, a long nose, a thin beard, and a manner that was courteous, self-possessed and entirely without bluster. He wore a modest turban and simple dress; he did not affect the jewelled ostentation of the courts around him.

His habits reinforce the picture. He was abstemious — no wine, no opium, no dissipation of any kind in a period when Deccan and Mughal courts alike ran on both. He rose early. He was devout without being ostentatious, a worshipper of Bhavānī and of Śiva, disciple in spirit of Samartha Rāmdās and of Tukārām. He slept little and moved constantly, and his commanders' letters complain that nobody could keep up with him. He was personally brave to the point of recklessness — at Pratapgad, at the Lal Mahal, at Agra he put his own body in the place of maximum danger — but the recklessness was always calculated, and he never once gambled the state on a single throw.

Two further qualities defined him and explain more than any tactic. The first is his treatment of women, which was without parallel in the warfare of his age and is documented in his own orders. He laid down that no woman was to be harmed or taken in any campaign, on pain of mutilation or death; when a subordinate at Kalyan brought him the captured daughter-in-law of the Muslim governor as a prize, he had her returned to her family with an escort and honour. In 1645 he ordered the hands and feet cut off a Patil of Ranza who had raped a woman. Settled In an era in which the enslavement of women was standard practice on every side, this was not sentiment; it was a deliberate statement about what kind of state he intended to found.

The second is his treatment of places of worship and of scripture. He gave standing orders that mosques and Christian churches in captured territory were not to be touched, that the Qur'an if found was to be handed respectfully to a Muslim, and that non-combatants were not to be molested. He employed Muslims in his service throughout — Siddi Ibrahim as an artillery commander, Daulat Khan and Ibrahim Khan in the navy, Madari Mehtar who helped him escape from Agra, Kazi Haidar as a secretary. This was not the modern political abstraction that is sometimes read back into it. It was dharmic conduct in war, the deliberate opposite of what had been done to his own people, and it was also the reason the Deccan countryside came over to him: a peasant under Shivaji's protection knew his village would not be burned and his women would not be taken.

Taking the Hills

Torna to Javali — how a jagirdar's son became a power

The method, from the first, was forts. In 1647, aged sixteen or seventeen, he took Torna from a negligent Bijapuri garrison, found buried treasure in it, and used the money to build Rajgad a few miles away — which would be his capital for the next quarter-century. Then Kondana (later Sinhagad), Purandar, Chakan, Supe, Baramati, Indapur. Dādojī died in 1647 and Shivaji took the jāgīr into his own hands.

Bijapur's response was to arrest his father. In 1648 Shahaji was seized on the Adil Shah's orders and imprisoned, with the threat that he would be immured alive; Shivaji, showing the political sense that never left him, opened negotiations with the Mughal prince Aurangzeb at exactly the right moment to make Bijapur reconsider, and Shahaji was released in 1649. He then kept quiet for five years while his father lived under implicit hostage — and used the time to build.

In 1656 came Javali, and it is the episode that shows the harder side of his statecraft. The Mores of Javali held the densely forested valley that controlled the whole approach to the Konkan; they were Marathi, they were Hindu, and they refused to join Svarājya, choosing instead to remain Bijapur's men. Shivaji had Chandrarao More killed and took the valley by a swift assault. It is not a comfortable story and this account does not pretend otherwise: he judged that the project of Svarājya could not survive an armed rival in its own heartland who was in the pay of the enemy, and he acted on that judgement. From the ridge above Javali he immediately began building Pratapgad, and within three years that fort would justify the whole enterprise. Contested

Shāhajī Bhonsle

The father, and the lesson of a life spent in other men's service

Shivaji Maharaj's achievement is unintelligible without his father's career, because that career was the demonstration of exactly what could and could not be done inside the existing system — and the son took the lesson.

Shāhajī (1594–1664) was a soldier of the first rank. He served the Nizamshahi of Ahmadnagar, and when Shāh Jahān's armies broke that state he did something remarkable: between 1632 and 1636 he took a boy of the Nizamshahi line, set him up as Sultan, and ran an independent Nizamshahi state himself as regent, holding out against the combined Mughal and Bijapuri pressure for four years. He held Pune and Supe as his own jāgīr; at one point he controlled a broad swathe of the western Deccan. He came, in other words, within reach of sovereignty — and could not hold it, because he had no legitimacy of his own, no fortress system, no revenue base independent of grants from the powers he was defying, and no cause that would bring the countryside out for him. He was a great commander with no state behind him.

When the Mughals forced the settlement of 1636 he transferred to Bijapuri service and was posted far south to Bangalore, where he built a second career, took a second wife (Tukābāī Mohite), and administered a large southern jāgīr with real success. He was a patron of Sanskrit and Kannada letters and maintained a considerable court. He also kept the Pune jāgīr in his family's name and sent Jijābāī and the boy to hold it — which is how the whole subsequent history came about.

And then, in 1648, Bijapur demonstrated the lesson conclusively. Shāhajī was arrested on the Adil Shah's order, chained, and imprisoned — by one account walled up alive to a point where only his head remained free, and released only on terms. Nothing he had done, no service he had rendered, no army he had commanded, protected him for an afternoon. His seventeen-year-old son in Pune negotiated with the Mughals to create counter-pressure and got him out in 1649 — and then kept quiet for five years while his father remained effectively a hostage.

Shāhajī died in a hunting accident near Hodigere in 1664. He never joined the Svarājya and probably never entirely approved of it; his own strategy had been to work the system rather than break it. But he gave his son three things that mattered: the Pune jāgīr as a base, the professional military knowledge of the Deccan wars, and — by the shape of his own life — the conclusive proof that ability without sovereignty is a house built on another man's land. Settled

The Household

Marriages, queens, children, and the private man

The domestic life is usually skipped, and it should not be, both because it was the instrument of a deliberate political strategy and because the record of it is a good deal fuller than most readers know.

He married eight times, and almost every marriage was an alliance with a Maratha house whose adherence mattered. Saibai Nimbālkar, of the ruling family of Phaltan, was the first and by every account the closest to him; the marriage was made at the Lal Mahal in Pune in May 1640, when both were children, with Jijābāī presiding in Shāhajī's absence. She bore Sambhaji and three daughters — Sakhūbāī, Raṇubāī and Ambikābāī — and died in 1659, shortly before Pratapgad, when Sambhaji was two. Her loss is felt in everything that followed for that boy.

Soyarābāī Mohite, sister of the Senāpati Hambīrrāo Mohite, was married at Bangalore on the insistence of Shivaji's stepmother Tukābāī, who was her paternal aunt. She bore Rājārām and Dīpābāī, became chief queen after Saibai's death, and was the centre of the Raigad faction that sought the succession for her son — the division that shadowed the last years and the first months after them. Putalabāī Pālkar, married in 1653, was childless and became satī at his funeral. Sakvarbāī Gāikwāḍ, married in January 1657, bore a daughter Kamalābāī, wished to follow Putalabāī and was prevented because she had a child, and died years later in Mughal captivity after Raigad fell. The others recorded are Kāśībāī Jādhav, Sagunābāī Śirke, Lakṣmībāī Vichāre and Guṇavantābāī Iṅgḷe.

The pattern is plain: Nimbālkar, Mohite, Pālkar, Gāikwāḍ, Jādhav, Śirke, Iṅgḷe — the great Marathi deśmukh houses, one after another, bound into the Bhonsle family. In a society where those houses had spent three centuries fighting each other in sultanate service, marriage was the available instrument of unification, and he used it systematically. His daughters were married outward on the same principle, into the Jādhav and Pālkar and Nimbālkar families.

It did not always work, and the record should say so. The Śirke connection produced Gaṇojī Śirke, who betrayed Sambhaji at Sangameshwar over a property dispute. The Mohite connection produced both Hambīrrāo, the loyal Senāpati, and Soyarābāī's faction. Family alliance bought adherence; it did not guarantee it.

Of the man at home there are only glimpses, and they are consistent. He was devoted to Jijābāī to the end and touched her feet before he took the throne. He was abstemious — no wine, no opium, no dissipation in an age when the Deccan courts ran on all three. He rose before dawn, worshipped, and worked. He was a devotee of Bhavānī of Tuljapur, the family goddess, and of Śiva, and kept the company of Samartha Rāmdās and honoured Tukārām. He was a poor sleeper and a constant traveller, and his officers' correspondence complains that nobody could keep pace with him. And he was, by every hostile and friendly account alike, courteous — a man who did not shout, did not boast, and did not need to.